“We will be announcing additional sanctions on Syria as part of our ongoing effort to stop this type of activity and emphasize how significant we view this,” Mnuchin said one day after President Donald Trump sent 59 cruise missile into Syria to retaliate for a gas attack on a Syrian village. “And we expect that those will continue to have an important effect on preventing people from doing business with them.”

Mnuchin, speaking at a press briefing Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, said the sanctions would be released “in the near future” but did not go into detail.

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“But I would just say we view sanctions as being a very important tool, whether it’s North Korea or whether it’s Syria. These sanctions are very important and we will use them to the maximum effect,” he said.

Trump’s Syrian policy had appeared to be veering one way as recently as a week ago, when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson indicated the departure of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad was no longer a precondition for an end to the Syrian civil war.

Tillerson now says, as President Donald Trump did on Wednesday, that sooner or later, Assad must go.

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“Through the Geneva process, we will start a political process to resolve Syria’s future in terms of its governance structure and that ultimately, in our view, will lead to a resolution of Bashar al Assad’s departure,” Tillerson said Friday.

Diplomacy may take precedence over future military actions because of the presence of Russian forces in Syria.

“Russia’s presence makes deep U.S. involvement very hard,” said Michael Leiter, former director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. “It’s not just Assad, but a Syria-Russia-Iranian alliance that makes the geopolitical consequences very difficult.

Tillerson will be traveling to Moscow on Wednesday for previously scheduled meetings during which the issue of Syria is certain to emerge.

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Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who supported Trump’s use of force on Thursday, said that as a new policy emerges, Congress must be at the table.

“The role of Congress is hopefully to guide the formulation of a policy towards Syria, and ultimately we’ll be asked to fund it and potentially authorize it,” Rubio said Friday.